Essay

Essay

It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

Essay

Essay

No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since, and central to their explanations is the remarkable political and diplomatic structure, the League of the Iroquois.

Essay

On April 10, 1606, James I of England granted a charter to the Virginia Company. The aims of the Jamestown expedition were to establish England’s claim to North America, search for gold or silver mines, find a passage to the Pacific Ocean (the “Other Sea”), harvest the natural resources of the land, and trade with Indian peoples.

Essay

Colonial America’s Jewish population offers a good case study of how original plans often went awry, though undoubtedly in the case of the Jews in large part to their satisfaction, rather than to their dismay and disappointment. The history of the Jewish people on the North American mainland dates to 1654, when a small band of twenty-three men, women, and children made landfall at New Amsterdam on the southern edge of Manhattan Island.

Essay

By the middle of the eighteenth century both the British and the French believed that a military contest in North America was inevitable as an element of their global rivalry. Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia and other colonial governors were in constant correspondence concerning the French threat. In 1753, Dinwiddie sent Major George Washington, his newly appointed militia adjutant of the southern district of Virginia, to confront the French.

Essay

The story of the Native people who came in contact with colonial Virginians is a complex and layered story of diplomacy. We often refer to these nations as tribes today, but each had independence, political autonomy, and what we should think of as foreign policies designed to deal with other American Indian nations and with the European nations who were settling in North America.

Essay

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington.